THE TEAM | TaPIR Lab

Meet the team

Director

Aiyun Huang

Director

Aiyun Huang

Supervisor

Aiyun Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer.

Born in Taiwan, she holds a DMA from the University of California, San Diego, where she was a Faculty Fellow after completing her doctoral studies.

Between 2006 and 2017, she led the percussion program at McGill University transforming the studio into one vibrant contemporary music program of international reputation.

Aiyun came to the University of Toronto, her alma mater, in 2017 where she serves as the head of the percussion studies program. Her recent highlights include solo with St. Lawrence String Quartet, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Taipei Symphony Orchestra as well as a new release on Naxos Canadian Classics featuring the works of Canadian composer Chris Paul Harman.

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Guest Collaborators

David Bithell

Guest Collaborator

David Bithell

Guest Collaborator

David Bithell is an interdisciplinary composer, artist, and performer exploring the connections between visual art, music, theater, and performance. Utilizing new technologies and real-time interactive environments, his work brings the precision and structure of contemporary music and audio practices together with an understanding of performance, narrative, and humor drawn from recent theater, live cinema, and performance art.

His works have been presented at major venues in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Highlights include: the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), SPARK Festival of Electronic Music and Art (Minneapolis), Ghent International Film Festival, Pixilerations [v.6], the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the MANCA Festival (France), the IS ARTI Festival (Lithuania), and at numerous colleges and universities in the United States. He has received grants and commissions from Meet the Composer Commissioning Music / USA, the American Composerʼs Forum, the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and the President's Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Fund at SOU.

He currently is an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Southern Oregon University where he heads the Cross-disciplinary Studio for Art and Technology (xARTS) and is a core faculty member of the Center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts (EMDA).

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Christopher Dobrian

Guest Collaborator

Christopher Dobrian

Guest Collaborator

Christopher Dobrian is Professor of Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology in the Department of Music, with a joint appointment in the Department of Informatics. He is a composer of instrumental and electronic music, and teaches courses in composition, theory, and computer music. He conducts research on the development of artificially intelligent interactive computer systems for the cognition, composition, and improvisation of music. He has published technical and theoretical articles on interactive computer music, and is the author of the original reference documentation and tutorials for the Max, MSP, and Jitter programming environments by Cycling '74. He holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied composition with Joji Yuasa, Robert Erickson, Morton Feldman, and Bernard Rands, computer music with F. Richard Moore and George Lewis, and classical guitar with the Spanish masters Celin and Pepe Romero.

Dobrian has been an invited Fulbright specialist at the Korean National University of Arts, the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and McGill University in Montreal, and has been a guest professor at Yonsei University, Taiwan National Normal University, University of Paris 8, and the National University of Quilmes in Argentina. His computer music compositions include Microepiphanies: A Digital Opera, a completely computer-controlled performance; Invisible Walls for dancers, motion tracking system, and computer-controlled synthesizer; Distance Duo for two computer pianos in remote locations connected via Internet; Mannam for Korean flute (daegeum) and interactive computer system; JazzBot for piano and musical robots; Tautology for Two for trumpet, trombone, and computer, with the instrumentalists located in different cities; and Gestural for digital piano and interactive computer system responding to the musical gestures of an improviser.

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Mari Kimura

Guest Collaborator

Mari Kimura

Guest Collaborator

Mari Kimura is at the forefront of violinists who are extending the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument. As a performer, composer, researcher, and entrepreneur, she has opened up new sonic worlds and new musical possibilities for the violin. Notably, she has mastered the production of pitches that sound up to an octave below the violin’s lowest string without re-tuning: a technique which she calls subharmonics.

As a composer, Mari is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Fromm Award from Harvard, residencies at the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund and IRCAM in Paris. Mari’s commissions include the International Computer Music Association, Harvestworks, Music from Japan and others, supported by grants including New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, New Music USA/Meet The Composer, Japan Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.

As an educator, Mari is the Founding Chair of the Future Music Lab at the Atlantic Music Festival in collaboration with IRCAM since 2013. The program focuses on high-level instrumental performers, who explore composition, improvisation and performance using the latest technology. Since 1998, Mari has been teaching a graduate course in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard. In 2017, Mari Kimura was named Professor of Music at UC Irvine’s “Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology” (ICIT) program, Music Department at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

Her most recent efforts involves entrepreneurship, and her prototype motion sensor MUGIC™ is now available for purchase.

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Levy Lorenzo

Guest Collaborator

Levy Lorenzo

Guest Collaborator

Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. On an international scale, his body of work spans custom electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, free improvisation, and classical percussion. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an electronic art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, and Leo Villareal. As a percussionist, he co-founded the experimental theater/electronics duo Radical 2 with Dennis Sullivan and is a member of the Peter Evans Septet. As a sound engineer, he specializes in the realization and performance of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. One of his main engagements is Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), he fulfills multiple roles as live sound engineer, electronicist, and percussionist.

Filling a unique niche, Levy is in demand as a freelance designer and artist. His work has been featured at STEIM, Harvestworks, MIT Media Lab, Ensemble Moderne, Darmstadt, Yellow Barn, Pitchfork.com, Slashdot.org, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, The New York Times, BBC, and Burning Man. An advocate for interdisciplinary arts, he has collaborated with dancers, video artists, public artists, mathematicians, sculptors, architects, and dramaturgs. Bridging the gap between the electronics design cycle and the performance practice of cutting-edge contemporary music, Levy is as equally comfortable wielding a soldering iron as drumsticks and four-mallets. He has fluency navigating hardware schematics and coding in various software environments, as well as interpreting complex musical scores and playing chamber music.

Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has given numerous guest workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts.

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Research Associates

Louis Pino

Research Associate, Lab Manager

Louis Pino

Research Associate

Louis Pino is a percussionist and technologist living in Toronto. His work tends to focus on physical theatricality centered around themes of neural entrainment and absurdity. He often makes use of motion and light sensors, incorporating technologies like the no input mixer and various homemade synthesizers and controllers in order to create systems in which the body, mind, and sound form one unit. His most recent project with TaPIR is the composition and recording of a quartet for percussion, making use of the MUGIC gestural controller and Arduino for both sound and lighting design. Future plans for Pino include the development of percussion specific software to better calibrate and utilize the MUGIC sensor, and the composition of a solo for open instrumentation and electronics acting as both an artistic creation and a learning tool for instrumentalists interested in hands-on experience with the Max MSP software.

www.louispino.com

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Research Assistants